1. Everything that exists must have a cause.
2. The universe must have a cause (from 1).
3. Nothing can be the cause of itself.
4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).
5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe
(from 2 & 4).
6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.
7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6).
8. God exists.

FLAW 1: can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is
a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some
problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God
himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction
to either his first premise — and say that though God
exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise
— and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his
premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining why God must be the
unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of
Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you
admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique,
can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause,
or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to
stop somewhere, why
not with the universe?

FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our
best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by
physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor;
smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the
universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause,
extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of
skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of
cause, was developed by David Hume.

COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang,
and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of
our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than
nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to
this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be
complaining!"

2. The Ontological Argument

1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated
as part of the definition of "God").
2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.3 . If we conceive of God as not
existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).
4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God
(from 1 and 3).
5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).
6. God exists.

This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of
Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level.
Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there
are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at
the same time say "unicorns don't exist." The claim of the
Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this
rule. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is
something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there
is something wrong with this argument, it's not so easy to figure out what it
is.

FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in the Ontological
Argument: it is to treat "existence" as a property, like "being
fat" or "having ten fingers." The Ontological Argument relies on
a bit of wordplay, assuming that "existence" is just another property,
but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat
"existence" as just part of the definition of the concept of God,
then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other
concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn
as "a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists."
So if you think about a trunicorn, you're thinking about something that must,
by definition, exist; therefore trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we
could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination
exists.

COMMENT: Once again, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this
one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is
such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?

3. The Argument from Design

A. The Classical Teleological Argument

1. Whenever there are things that cohere only
because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a
watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who
designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen
by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store
could not assemble a watch.)
2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere
only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens,
retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only
because together they make it possible for the animal to see.)
3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their
function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an
eyemaker (from 1 & 2).
4. These things have not had a human designer.
5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer
(from 3 & 4).
6. God is the non-human designer (from 5).
7. God exists.

FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the
illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators
make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving
rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the
replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for
replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop
up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than
its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the
population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to
have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is
accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective
replication. The fallacy in the argument, then is
Premise 1 (and as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a
complex object
serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.

In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological
Argument in three forms:

B. The Argument from Irreducible
Complexity

1. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be
an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and
reproduce better than its competitors.
2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any
part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are,
the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and
the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. Call these organs
"irreducibly complex."
3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that
possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).
4. The Theory of Natural Selection cannot explain these
irreducibly complex systems (from 1 & 3).
5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of
the Classical Teleological Argument.
6. God exists (from 4 & 5 and the Classical Teleological
Argument).

This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies
to it still hold.

FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still
see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.

FLAW 2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may
render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been
useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were
large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels.
This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum
motor, invoked in the modern version of the Argument from Irreducible
Complexity.

FLAW 3: (The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological
systems for which we don't yet know how they may have been useful in simpler
versions. But there are obviously many things we don't yet understand in
molecular biology, and given the huge success that biologists have achieved in
explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological
systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be
filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural
designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.

COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more
general and fallacious Argument from Ignorance:

1.There are things that we cannot
explain yet.

2. Those things must be caused by God.

FLAW: Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren't things that we could not
explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and observatories
would unplug their computers and convert to condominiums, and all departments
of science would be converted to departments in the History of Science. Science
is only in business because there are things we have not explained yet. So we
cannot infer from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be
a God.

C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations

1. Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural
selection.
2. Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of
probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the worse than
for the better.
3. The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism
(from 2).
4. The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations
needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is preposterously long
(from 3).
5. In order for evolution to work, something outside of evolution
had to bias the process of mutation, increasing the number of benign ones (from
4).
6. Something outside of the mechanism of biological change — the
Prime Mutator — must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from
5).
7. The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful
enough to be the Prime Mutator is God.8 .God exists.

FLAW: Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such as
a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single generation, because
(a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that is slightly more transparent,
or cells that are slightly more sensitive to light), and mutations contributing
to these effects can accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing
organism, the necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after the
other in a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in
thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the necessary
combinations could come together as the organisms mate and exchange genes; (c)
life on earth has had a vast amount of time to accumulate the necessary
mutations (almost four billion years).

D. The New Argument from The Original
Replicator

1. Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from
simpler ancestors.
2. Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor —
the first living thing — came into existence (from 1).
3. The theory of natural selection can deal with this problem
only by saying the first living thing evolved out of non-living matter (from
2).
4. That non-living matter (call it the Original Replicator) must
be capable of (i) self-replication (ii) generating a functioning mechanism out
of surrounding matter to protect itself against falling apart, and (iii)
surviving slight mutations to itself that will then result in slightly
different replicators.
5. The Original Replicator is complex (from 4).
6. The Original Replicator is too complex to have arisen from
purely physical processes (from 5 & the Classical Teleological Argument).
For example, DNA, which currently carries the replicated design of organisms,
cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules requires a complex
system of proteins to remain stable and to replicate, and could not have arisen
from natural processes before complex life existed.
7. Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the
Original Replicator (from 3 & 6).
8. The Original Replicator must have been created rather than
have evolved (from 7 and the Classical Teleological Argument).
9. Anything that was created requires a Creator.
10. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 6 states that a replicator, because of its complexity, cannot
have arisen from natural processes, i.e. by way of natural selection. But the
mathematician John von Neumann showed in the 1950s that it is theoretically
possible for a simple physical system to make exact copies of itself from
surrounding materials. Since then, biologists and chemists have identified a
number of naturally occurring molecules and crystals that can replicate in ways
that could lead to natural selection (in particular, that allow random
variations to be preserved in the copies). Once a molecule replicates, the
process of natural selection can kick in, and the replicator can accumulate
matter and become more complex, eventually leading to precursors of the
replication system used by living organisms today.

FLAW 2: Even without von Neumann's work (which not everyone accepts as
conclusive), to conclude the existence of God from our not yet knowing how to
explain the Original Replicator is to rely on The Argument from Ignorance.

4. The Argument from The Big Bang

1. The Big Bang, according to the best scientific opinion of our
day, was the beginning of the physical universe, including not only matter and
energy, but space and time and the laws of physics.
2. The universe came to be ex nihilo (from 1).
3. Something outside the universe, including outside its physical
laws, must have brought the universe into existence (from 2).
4. Only God could exist outside the universe.
5. God must have been caused the universe to exist (from 3 &
4).
6. God exists.

The Big Bang is based on the observed expansion of the universe, with galaxies
rushing away from each other. The implication is that if we run the film of the
universe backward from the present, the universe must continuously contract,
all the way back to a single point. The theory of the Big Bang is that the
universe exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago.

FLAW 1: Cosmologists themselves do not all agree that the Big Bang is a
"singularity" — the sudden appearance of space, time, and physical
laws from inexplicable nothingness. The Big Bang may represent the lawful
emergence of a new universe from a previously existing one. In that case, it
would be superfluous to invoke God to explain the emergence of something from
nothing.

FLAW 2: The Argument From the Big Bang has all the flaws of The Cosmological
Argument — it passes the buck from the mystery of the origin of the universe to
the mystery of the origin of God, and it extends the notion of
"cause" outside the domain of events covered by natural laws (also
known as the universe) where it no longer makes sense.

5. The Arguments from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants

1. There are a vast number of physically possible universes.
2. A universe that would be hospitable to the appearance of life
must conform to some very strict conditions: Everything from the mass ratios of
atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological
parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be just right for
stable galaxies, solar systems, planets, and complex life to evolve.
3. The percentage of possible universes that would support life
is infinitesimally small (from 2).
4. Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes.
5. Our universe has been fine-tuned to support life (from 3 &
4).
6. There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5).
7. Only God could have the power and the purpose to be the
Fine-Tuner.
8. God exists.

Philosophers and physicists often speak of "The Anthropic Principle,"
which comes in several versions, labeled "weak," "strong"
and "very strong." All three versions argue that any explanation of
the universe must account for the fact that we humans ( or
any complex organism that could observe its condition) exist in it. The
Argument from Fine-Tuning corresponds to the Very Strong Anthropic Principle.
Its upshot is that the upshot of the universe is . . . us. The universe must
have been designed with us in mind.

FLAW 1: The first premise may be false. Many physicists and cosmologists,
following Einstein, hope for a unified "theory of everything," which
would deduce from as-yet-unknown physical laws that the physical constants of
our universe had to be what they are. In that case, ours would be the only
possible universe. (See also The Argument from the Intelligibility of the
Universe,# 35, below).

FLAW 2: Even were we to accept the first premise, the transition from 4 to 5 is
invalid. Perhaps we are living in a multiverse (a term coined by William James),
a vast plurality (perhaps infinite) of parallel universes with different
physical constants, all of them composing one reality. We find ourselves,
unsurprisingly (since we are here doing the observing), in one of the rare
universe that does support the appearance of stable matter and complex life,
but nothing had to have been fine-tuned. Or perhaps we are living in an
"oscillatory universe," a succession of universes with differing
physical constants, each one collapsing into a point and then exploding with a
new big bang into a new universe with different physical constants, one
succeeding the other over an infinite time span. Again, we find ourselves, not
surprisingly, in one of those time-slices in which the universe does have
physical constants that support stable matter and complex life.
These hypotheses, which are receiving much attention from contemporary
cosmologists, are sufficient to invalidate the leap from 4 to 5.

6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws

1. Scientists use aesthetic principles (simplicity, symmetry,
elegance) to discover the laws of nature.
2. Scientist s could only use aesthetic principles successfully
if the laws of nature were intrinsically and objectively beautiful.
3. The laws of nature are intrinsically and objectively beautiful
(from 1 & 2).
4. Only a mind-like being with an appreciation of beauty could
have designed the laws of nature.5 . God is the only being with the power
and purpose to design beautiful laws of nature.
6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Do we decide an explanation is good because it's beautiful, or do we
find an explanation beautiful because it provides a good explanation? When we
say that the laws of nature are beautiful, what we are really saying is that
the laws of nature are the laws of nature, and thus unify into elegant
explanation a vast host of seemingly unrelated and random phenomena. We would
find the laws of nature of any lawful universe beautiful. So what this argument
boils down to is the observation that we live in a lawful universe. And of
course any universe that could support the likes of us would have to be lawful.
So this argument is another version of the The Anthropic Principle — we live in
the kind of universe which is the only kind of universe in which observers like
us could live — and thus is subject to the flaws of Argument #5.

FLAW 2: If the laws of the universe are intrinsically beautiful, then positing
a God who loves beauty, and who is mysteriously capable of creating an elegant
universe (and presumably a messy one as well, though his aesthetic tastes led
him not to), makes the universe complex and incomprehensible all over again.
This negates the intuition behind Premise 3, that the universe is intrinsically
elegant and intelligible. (See The Argument from the Intelligibility of the
Universe, #35 below.)

7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences

1. The universe contains many uncanny coincidences, such as that
the diameter of the moon, as seen from the earth is the same as the diameter of
the sun, as seen from the earth, which is why we can have spectacular eclipses
when the corona of the sun is revealed.
2. Coincidences are, by definition, overwhelmingly improbable.
3. The overwhelmingly improbable defies all statistical
explanation.
4. These coincidences are such as to enhance our awed
appreciation for the beauty of the natural world.
5. These coincidences must have been designed in order to enhance
our awed appreciation of the beauty of the natural world (from 3 & 4).
6. Only a being with the power to effect
such uncanny coincidences and the purpose of enhancing our awed appreciation of
the beauty of the natural world could have arranged these uncanny cosmic
coincidences.
7. Only God could be the being with such power and such purpose.
8. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 does not follow from Premise 2. The occurrence of the highly
improbable can be statistically explained in two ways. One is when we have a
very large sample. A one-in-a-million event is not improbable at all if there
are a million opportunities for it to occur. The other is that there is a huge number of occurrences that could be counted as
coincidences, if we don't specify them beforehand but just notice them after
the fact. (There could have been a constellation that forms a square around the
moon; there could have been a comet that appeared on January 1, 2000; there
could have been a constellation in the shape of a Star of David, etc. etc.
etc.) When you consider how many coincidences are possible, the fact that we
observe any one coincidence (which we notice after the fact) is not improbably
but likely. And let's not forget the statistically improbable coincidences that
cause havoc and suffering, rather than awe and wonder, in
humans: the perfect storm, the perfect tsunami, the perfect plague, etc.

FLAW 2: The derivation of Premise 5 from Premises 3 and 4 is invalid: an
example of the Projection Fallacy, in which we project the workings of our mind
onto the world, and assume that our own subjective reaction is the result of
some cosmic plan to cause that reaction. The human brain sees patterns in all
kinds of random configurations: cloud formations, constellations, tea leaves,
inkblots. That is why we are so good at finding supposed coincidences. It is getting
things backwards to say that, in every case in which we see a pattern, someone
deliberately put that pattern in the universe for us to see.

COMMENT: Prominent among the uncanny coincidences that figure
into this argument are those having to do with numbers. Numbers are
mysterious to us because they are not material objects like rocks and tables,
but at the same time they seem to be real entities, ones that we can't conjure
up with any properties we fancy but that have their own necessary properties and
relations, and hence must somehow exist outside us (see The Argument from Our
Knowledge of The Infinite, #29, and The Argument from Mathematical Reality, #30
below). We are therefore likely to attribute magical powers to them. And, given
the infinity of numbers and the countless possible ways to apply them to the
world, "uncanny coincidences" are bound to occur (see FLAW 1). In
Hebrew, the letters are also numbers, which has given rise to the mystical art
of "gematria," often used to elucidate, speculate, and prophesy about
the unknowable.

8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences

1. People experience uncanny coincidences in their lives (for
example, an old friend calling out of the blue just when you're thinking of
him, or a dream about some event that turns out to have just happened, or
missing a flight that then crashes).
2. Uncanny coincidences cannot be explained by the laws of
probability (which is why we call them uncanny).
3. These uncanny coincidences, inexplicable by the laws of probability,
reveal a significance to our lives.
4. Only a being who deems our lives significant and who has the
power to effect these coincidences could arrange for
them to happen.
5. Only God both deems our lives significant and has the power to
effect these coincidences.
6. God exists.

FLAW 1: The second premise suffers from the major flaw of the Argument from
Cosmic Coincidences: a large number of experiences, together with the large
number of patterns that we would call "coincidences" after the fact,
make uncanny coincidences probable, not improbable.

FLAW 2: Psychologists have shown that people are subject to an illusion called
Confirmation Bias. When they have a hypothesis (such as that daydreams predict
the future), they vividly notice all the instances that confirm it (the times
when they think of a friend and he calls), and forget all the instances that
don't (the times when they think of a friend and he doesn't call). Likewise,
who among us remembers all the times when we miss a plane and it doesn't crash?
The vast number of non-events we live through don't
make an impression on us; the few coincidences do.

FLAW 3: There is an additional strong psychological bias at work here: Every
one of us treats his or her own life with utmost seriousness.
For all of us, there can be nothing more significant than the lives we are
living. As David Hume pointed out, the self has an inclination to "spread
itself on the world," projecting onto objective reality the psychological
assumptions and attitudes that are too constant to be noticed, that play in the
background like a noise you don't realize you are hearing until it stops. This
form of the Projection Fallacy is especially powerful when it comes to the
emotionally fraught questions about our own significance.

9. The Argument from Answered Prayers

1. Sometimes people pray to God for good fortune, and against
enormous odds, their calls are answered. (For example, a parent prays for the
life of her dying child, and the child recovers.)
2. The odds of the beneficial event happening are enormously slim
(from 1).
3. The odds that the prayer would have been followed by recovery
out of sheer chance are extremely small (from 2).
4. The prayer could only have been followed by the recovery if God
listened to it and made it come true.
5. God exists.

This argument is similar to The Argument from Miracles below, except instead of
the official miracles claimed by established religion, it refers to intimate
and personal miracles.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is indeed true. However, to use it to infer that a miracle
has taken place (and an answered prayer is certainly a miracle) is to subvert
it. There is nothing that is less probable than a miracle, since it constitutes
a violation of a law of nature (see The Argument from Miracles, #11, below).
Therefore, it is more reasonable to conclude that the correlation of the prayer
and the recovery is a coincidence than that it is a miracle.

FLAW 2: The coincidence of a person praying for the unlikely to happen and its
then happening is, of course, improbable. But the flaws in The Argument from
Cosmic Coincidences and The Argument from Personal Coincidences apply here:
Given a large enough sample of prayers (the number of times people call out to
God to help them and those they love is tragically large),
the improbable is bound to happen occasionally. And, given the existence of
Confirmation Bias, we will notice these coincidences, yet fail to notice and
count up the vastly larger number of unanswered prayers.

FLAW 3: There is an inconsistency in the moral reasoning behind this argument.
It asks us to believe in a compassionate God who would be moved to pity by the
desperate pleas of some among us — but not by the equally desperate pleas of
others among us. Together with The Argument from A Wonderful Life, it appears
to be supported by a few cherry-picked examples, but in fact is refuted by the
much larger number of counterexamples it ignores: the prayers that go
unanswered, the people who do not live wonderful lives. When
the life is our own, or that of someone we love, we are especially liable to
the Projection Fallacy, and spread our personal sense of significance onto the
world at Large.

FLAW 4: Reliable cases of answered prayers always involve medical conditions
that we know can spontaneously resolve themselves through the healing powers
and immune system of the body, such as recovery from cancer, or a coma, or
lameness. Prayers that a person can grow back a limb, or that a child can be
resurrected from the dead, always go unanswered. This affirms that supposedly
answered prayers are actually just the rarer cases of natural recovery.

10. The Argument from A Wonderful Life

1. Sometimes people who are lost in life find their way.
2. These people could not have known the right way on their own.
3. These people were shown the right way by something or someone
other than themselves (from 2).
4. There was no person showing them the way.
5. God alone is a being who is not a person and who cares about
each of us enough to show us the way.
6. Only God could have helped these lost souls (from 4 & 5).
7. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 2 ignores the psychological complexity of people. People have
inner resources on which they draw, often without knowing how they are doing it
or even that they are doing it. Psychologists have shown that events in our
conscious lives—from linguistic intuitions of which sentences sound grammatical
to moral intuitions of what would be the right thing to do in a moral dilemma—are
the end-products of complicated mental manipulations of which we are unaware.
So, too, decisions and resolutions can bubble
into awareness without our being conscious of the processes that led to them.
These epiphanies seem to announce themselves to us, as if they came from an
external guide: another example of the Projection Fallacy.

FLAW 2: The same as FLAW 3 in The Argument from Answered
Prayers, #9 above.

11. The Argument from Miracles

1. Miracles are events that violate the laws of nature.
2. Miracles can be explained only by a force that has the power
of suspending the laws of nature for the purpose of making its presence known
or changing the course of human history (from 1).
3. Only God has the power and the purpose to carry out miracles
(from 2).
4. We have a multitude of written and oral reports of miracles.
(Indeed, every major religion is founded on a list of miracles.)
5. Human testimony would be useless if it were not, in the
majority of cases, veridical.
6. The best explanation for why there are so many reports
testifying to the same thing is that the reports are
true (from 5).
7. The best explanation for the multitudinous reports of miracles
is that miracles have indeed occurred (from 6).
8. God exists (from 3 & 7).

FLAW 1: It is certainly true, as Premise 4 asserts,
that we have a multitude of reports of miracles, with each religion insisting
on those that establish it alone as the true religion. But the reports are not
testifying to the same events; each miracle list justifies one religion at the
expense of the others. See FLAW 2 in the Argument from Holy Books, #23 below.

FLAW 2: The fatal flaw in The Argument from Miracles was masterfully exposed by
David Hume in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter 10, "On Miracles." Human testimony may often be
accurate, but it is very far from infallible. People are sometimes mistaken;
people are sometimes dishonest; people are sometimes gullible — indeed, more
than sometimes. Since in order to believe that a miracle has occurred we must
believe a law of nature has been violated (something for which we otherwise
have the maximum of empirical evidence), and we can only believe it on the
basis of the truthfulness of human testimony (which we already know is often
inaccurate), then even if we knew nothing else about the event, and had no
particular reason to distrust the reports of witness, we would have to conclude
that it is more likely that the miracle has not occurred, and that there is an
error in the testimony, than that the miracle has occurred. (Hume strengthens
his argument, already strong, by observing that religion creates situations in
which there are particular reasons to distrust the reports of witnesses.
"But if the spirit of religion join itself to the
love of wonder, there is an end of common sense.")

COMMENT: The Argument from Miracles covers more specific arguments, such as The
Argument from Prophets, The Arguments from Messiahs, and the Argument from
Individuals with Miraculous Powers.

12. The Argument from The Hard Problem of
Consciousness

1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness consists in our difficulty
in explaining why it subjectively feels like something to be a functioning
brain. (This is to be distinguished from the so-called Easy Problem of
Consciousness, which is not actually easy at all, and is only called so in
relation to the intractable Hard Problem. See FLAW 3 below.)
2. Consciousness (in the Hard-Problem sense) is not a complex
phenomenon built out of simpler ones; it can consist of irreducible "raw
feels" like seeing red or tasting salt.
3. Science explains complex phenomena by reducing them to simpler
ones, and reducing them to still simpler ones, until the simplest ones are
explained by the basic laws of physics.
4. The basic laws of physics laws describe the properties of the
elementary constituents of matter and energy, like quarks and quanta, which are
not conscious.
5. Science cannot derive consciousness by reducing it to basic
physical laws about the elementary constituents of matter and energy (from 2,
3, and 4).
6. Science will never solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness
(from 3 and 5).
7. The explanation for consciousness must lie beyond physical
laws (from 6).
8. Consciousness, lying outside physical laws, must itself be
immaterial (from 7).
9. God is immaterial
10. Consciousness and God both partake in the same immaterial
kind of being (from 8 and 9).
11. God has not only the means to impart consciousness to us, but
also the motive, namely, to allow us to enjoy a good life, and to make it
possible for our choices to cause or prevent suffering in others, thereby
allowing for morality and meaning.
12. Consciousness can only be explained by positing that God
inserted a spark of the divine into us (from 7, 10, & 11).
13. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is dubious. Science often shows that properties can be
emergent: they arise from complex interactions of simpler elements, even if
they cannot be found in any of the elements themselves. (Water is wet, but that
does not mean that every H¬2 0 molecule it is made of is also wet.) Granted, we
do not have a theory of neuroscience that explains how consciousness emerges
from patterns of neural activity, but to draw theological conclusions from the
currently incomplete state of scientific knowledge is to commit the Fallacy of
Arguing from Ignorance.

FLAW 2: Alternatively, the theory of panpsychism posits that consciousness in a
low-grade form, what is often called "proto-consciousness," is
inherent in matter. Our physical theories, with their mathematical methodology,
have not yet been able to capture this aspect of matter, but that may just be a
limitation on our mathematical physical theories. Some physicists have hypothesized
that contemporary malaise about the foundations of quantum mechanics arise
because physics is here confronting the intrinsic consciousness of matter,
which has not yet been adequately formalized within physical theories.

FLAW 3: It has become clear that every measurable manifestation of
consciousness, like our ability to describe what we feel, or let our feelings
guide our behavior (the "Easy Problem" of consciousness) has been, or
will be, explained in terms of neural activity (that is, every thought,
feeling, and intention has a neural correlate). Only the existence of
consciousness itself (the "Hard Problem") remains mysterious. But
perhaps the hardness of the hard problem says more about what we find hard —
the limitations of the brains of Homo sapiens when it tries to think
scientifically — than about the hardness of the problem itself. Just as our
brains do not allow us to visualize four-dimensional objects perhaps our brains
do not allow us to understand how subjective experience arises from complex
neural activity.

FLAW 4: Premise 12 is entirely unclear. How does invoking the spark of the
divine explain the existence of consciousness? It is the Fallacy of Using One
Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another.

COMMENT: Premise 11 is also dubious, because our capacity to suffer is far in
excess of what it would take to make moral choices possible. This will be
discussed in connection with The Argument from Suffering, #25 below.

13. The Argument from The Improbable Self

1. I exist in all my particularity and contingency: not as a
generic example of personhood, not as any old member of Homo sapiens, but as
that unique conscious entity that I know as me.
2. I can step outside myself and view my own contingent
particularity with astonishment.
3. This astonishment reveals that there must be something that
accounts for why, of all the particular things that I could have been, I am
just this, namely, me (from 1 & 2).
4. Nothing within the world can account for why I am just this,
since the laws of the world are generic: they can explain why certain kinds of
things come to be, even (let's assume) why human beings with conscious brains
come to be. But nothing in the world can explain why one of those human beings
should be me.
5. Only something outside the world, who
cares about me, can therefore account for why I am just this (from 4).
6. God is the only thing outside the world who
cares about each and every one of us.
7. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 5 is a blatant example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another. Granted that the problem boggles
the mind, but waving one's hands in the direction of God is no solution. It
gives us no sense of how God can account for why I am this thing and not
another.

COMMENT: In one way, this argument is reminiscent of the Anthropic
Principle. There are a vast number of people who could have been born.
One's own parents alone could have given birth to a vast number of alternatives
to oneself—same egg, different sperm; different egg, same
sperm; different egg, different sperm. Granted, one gropes for a reason for why
it was, against these terrific odds, that oneself came
to be born. But there may be no reason; it just happened. By the time you ask this question, you already are existing in a world in
which you were born. Another analogy: the odds that the phone company would
have given you your exact number are minuscule.
But it had to give you some number, so asking after the fact why it should be
that number is silly. Likewise, the child your parents conceived had to be
someone. Now that you're born, it's no mystery why it should be you; you're the
one asking the question.

14. The Argument from Survival after Death

1. There is empirical evidence that people survive after death: patients
who flat-line during medical emergencies report an experience of floating over
their bodies and seeing glimpses of a passage to another world, and can
accurately report what happened around their bodies while they were dead to the
world.
2. A person's consciousness can survive after the death of his or
her body (from 1)
3. Survival after death entails the existence of an immaterial
soul.
4. The immaterial soul exists (from 2 & 3).
5. If an immaterial soul exists, then God must exist (from
Premise 12 in The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness, #12, above).
6. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 5 is vulnerable to the same criticisms that were leveled against
Premise 12 in the Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Existence
after death no more implies God's existence than our existence before death
does.

COMMENT: Many, of course, would dispute Premise 1. The universal experiences of
people near death, such as auras and out-of-body experiences,
could be hallucinations resulting from oxygen deprivation in the brain. In
addition, miraculous resurrections after total brain death, and accurate
reports of conversations and events that took place while the brain was not
functioning, have never been scientifically documented, and are informal,
secondhand examples of testimony of miracles. They are thus vulnerable to the
same flaws pointed out in The Argument from Miracles. But the argument is
fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation

1. I cannot conceive of my own annihilation: as soon as I start
to think about what it would be like not to exist, I am thinking, which implies
that I would exist (as in Descartes' Cogito ergo sum), which implies that I would
not be thinking about what it is like not to exist.
2. My annihilation is inconceivable (from 1).
3. What cannot be conceived, cannot be.
4. I cannot be annihilated (from 2 & 3).
5. I survive after my death (from 4)

The argument now proceeds on as in the argument from Survival After Death, only substituting in 'I' for 'a person,' until
we get to: 6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Premise 2 confuses psychological inconceivability with logical
inconceivability. The sense in which I can't conceive of my own
annihilation is like the sense in which I can't conceive of those whom I love
may betray me—a failure of the imagination, not an impossible state of affairs.
Thus Premise 2 ought to read "My annihilation is inconceivable to me. ", which is a fact about what my brain
can conceive, not a fact about what exists.

FLAW 2: Same as Flaw 3 from The Argument from the
Survival of Death.

COMMENT: Though logically unsound, this is among the most powerful
psychological impulses to believe in a soul, and an afterlife, and God. It
genuinely is difficult—not to speak of disheartening— to conceive of oneself
not existing!

16. The Argument from Moral Truth

1. There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and
genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)

2. These objective moral truths are not
grounded in the way the world is but rather in the way that the world ought to
be. (Consider: should white-supremacists succeed, taking over the world and
eliminating all who don't meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their
ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, under this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way they
have made it.)
3. The world itself — the way that it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way — cannot account for the way
that the world ought to be.
4. The only way to account for morality is that God established
morality (from 2 and 3).
5. God exists.

FLAW 1: The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that
Plato made famous in the Euthyphro. Reference to
God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The
question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a
reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he
didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the
grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he
didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as
easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we
would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro
argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy
of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding
morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my
own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you
are not.

FLAW 2: Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the
God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the Bible
and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be morality at all.
The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their
enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous
acts. Of course, our interpretation of which aspects of Biblical morality to take
seriously has grown more sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible
selectively and often metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be
consulting some standards of morality that do not come from God in order to
judge which aspects of God's word to take literally and which aspects to
ignore.

COMMENT: Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a
flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by our
lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such
as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective values, and it is
obscure to say that statements that are consistent with those values are
objectively true in the same way that mathematical or scientific statements can
be true. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted.

17. The Argument from Altruism

1. People often act altruistically — namely, against their
interests. They help others, at a cost to themselves, out of empathy, fairness,
decency, and integrity.

2. Natural selection can never favor true
altruism, because genes for selfishness will always out-compete genes for
altruism (recall that altruism, by definition, exacts a cost to the actor).
3. Only a force acting outside of natural selection and intending
for us to be moral could account for our ability to act altruistically (from
2).
4. God is the only force outside of natural selection that could
intend us to be moral.
5. God must have implanted the moral instinct within us (from 3
& 4).
6. God exists.

FLAW 1: Theories of the evolution of altruism by natural selection have been
around for decades and are now widely supported by many kinds of evidence. A
gene for being kind to one's kin, even if it hurts the person doing the favor,
can be favored by evolution, because that gene would be helping a copy of
itself that is shared by the kin. And a gene for conferring a large benefit to
a non-relative at a cost to oneself can evolve if the favor-doer is the
beneficiary of a return favor at a later time. Both parties are better off, in
the long run, from the exchange of favors.

Some defenders of religion do not consider these theories to be legitimate
explanations of altruism, because a tendency to favor one's kin, or to trade
favors, are ultimately just forms of selfishness for one's genes, rather than
true altruism. But this is a confusion of the original phenomenon: we are
trying to explain why people are sometimes altruistic, not why genes are
altruistic. (We have no reason to believe that genes are ever altruistic in the
first place!) Also, in a species with language, namely humans, committed
altruists develop a reputation for being altruistic, and thereby win more
friends, allies, and trading partners. This can give rise to selection for
true, committed, altruism, not just the tit-for-tat exchange of favors.

FLAW 2: We have evolved higer mental faculties, such as self-reflection and logic, that allow us to reason about the world, to persuade
other people to form alliances with us, to learn from our mistakes, and to
achieve other feats of reason. Those same faculties, when they are honed
through debate, reason, and knowledge, can allow us to step outside ourselves,
learn about other people's point of view, and act in a way that we can justify
as maximizing everyone's well-being. We are capable of moral reasoning because
we are capable of reasoning in general.

FLAW 3: In some versions of the Argument from Altruism, God succeeds in getting
people to act altruistically because he promises them a divine reward and
threatens them with divine retribution. People behave altruistically to gain a
reward or avoid a punishment in the life to come. This argument is
self-contradictory. It aims to explain how people act without regard to their
self-interest, but then assumes that there could be no motive for acting
altruistically other than self-interest.

18. The Argument from Free Will

1. Having free will means having the freedom to choose our
actions, rather than their being determined by some prior cause.

2. If we don't have free will, then we are not agents, for then
we are not really acting, but rather we're being acted upon. (That's why we
don't punish people for involuntary actions—such as a teller who hands money to
a bank robber at gunpoint, or a driver who
injures a pedestrian after a defective tire blows out.)

3. To be a moral agent means to be held morally responsible for
what one does.

4. If we can't be held morally responsible for anything we do
then the very idea of morality is meaningless.

5. Morality is not meaningless.

6. We have free will (from 2- 5).

7. We, as moral agents, are not subject to the laws of nature, in
particular, the neural events in a genetically and environmentally determined
brain (from 1 and 6).

8. Only a being who is apart from the laws of nature and partakes
of the moral sphere could explain our being moral agents (from 7).

9. Only God is a being who is apart from the laws of nature and
partakes of the moral sphere.

10. Only God can explain our moral agency (from 8 & 9).

11. God exists.

FLAW 1: This argument, in order to lead to God, must ignore the paradoxical
Fork of Free Will. Either my actions are predictable (from my genes, my
upbringing, my brain state, my current situation, and so on), or they are not.
If they are predictable, then there is no reason to deny that they are caused,
and we would not have free will. So they must be unpredictable, in other words,
random. But if our behavior is random, then in what sense can it be
attributable to us at all? If it really is a random event when I give the infirm man my seat in the subway, then in
what sense is it me to whom this good deed should be attributed? If the action
isn't caused by my psychological states, which are themselves caused by other
states, then in one way is it really my action?
And what good would it do to insist on moral responsibility, if our choices are
random, and cannot be predicted from prior events (such as growing up in a
society that holds people
responsible)? This leads us back to the conclusion that we, as moral agents
must be parts of the natural world-- the very negation of 7.

FLAW 2: Premise 10 is an example of the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to
Pseudo-Explain Another. It expresses, rather than dispels, the confusion we
feel when faced with the Fork of Free Will. The paradox has not been clarified
in the least by introducing God into the analysis.

COMMENT: Free will is yet another quandary that takes us to the edge of our
human capacity for understanding. The concept is baffling, because our moral
agency seems to demand both that our actions be determined, and also that they
not be determined.

19. The Argument from Personal Purpose

1. If there is no purpose to a person's life, then that person's
life is pointless.

2. Human life cannot be pointless.

3. Each human life has a purpose (from 1 & 2).

4. The purpose of each individual person's life must derive from
the overall purpose of existence.
5. There is an overall purpose of existence (from 3 and 4)

6. Only a being who understood the overall purpose of existence
could create each person according to the purpose that person is meant to
fulfill.

7. Only God could understand the overall purpose of creation.

8. There can be a point to human existence only if God exists
(from 6 & 7).

9. God exists.

FLAW 1: The first premise rests on a confusion between
the purpose of an action and the purpose of a life. It is human activities that
have purposes—or don't. We study for the purpose of educating and
supporting ourselves. We eat right and exercise for the purpose of being
healthy. We warn children not to accept rides
with strangers for the purpose of keeping them safe. We donate to charity
for the purpose of helping the poor (just as we would want someone to help us
if we were poor.) The notion of a person's entire life serving a purpose, above
and beyond the purpose of all the person's choices, is obscure. Might it mean
the purpose for which the person was born? That implies that some goal-seeking
agent decided to bring our lives into being to serve some purpose. Then who is
that goal-seeking agent? Parents often purposively have children, but we
wouldn't want to see a parent's wishes as the purpose of the
child's life. If the goal-seeking
agent is God, the argument becomes circular: we make sense of the notion of
"the purpose of a life" by stipulating that the purpose is whatever
God had in mind when he created us, but then argue for the existence of God
because he is the only one who could have designed us with a purpose in mind.

FLAW 2: Premise 2 states that human life cannot be pointless. But of course it
could be pointless in the sense meant by this argument: lacking a purpose in
the grand scheme of things. It could very well be the there is no grand scheme
of things because there is no Grand Schemer. By assuming that there is a grand
scheme of things, it assumes that there is a schemer whose scheme it is, which
circularly assumes the conclusion.

COMMENT: It's important not to confuse the notion of "pointless" in
Premise 2 with notions like "not worth living" or
"expendable." It is probably confusions of this sort that give
Premise 2 its appeal. But we can very well maintain that each human life
is precious—is worth living, is not expendable—without maintaining that each
human life has a purpose in the overall scheme of things.

20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance

1. In a million years nothing that happens now will matter.

2. By the same token, anything that happens at any point in time
will not matter from the point of view of some other time a million years
distant from it into the future.

3. No point in time can confer mattering on any other point, for
each suffers from the same problem of not mattering itself (from 2).

4. It is intolerable (or inconceivable, or unacceptable) that in
a million years nothing that happens now will matter.

5. What happens now will matter in a million years (from 4).

6. It is only from the point of view of eternity that what
happens now will matter even in a million years (from 3).

7. Only God can inhabit the point of view of eternity.

8. God exists.

FLAW: Premise 4 is illicit: it is of the form "This argument must be
correct, because it is intolerable that this argument is not correct." The
argument is either circular, or an example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking.
Maybe we won't matter in a million years, and there's just nothing we can do
about it. If that is the case, we shouldn't declare that it is intolerable—we
just have to live with it. Another way of putting it is: we should take
ourselves seriously (being mindful of what we do, and the world we leave our
children and grandchildren), but we shouldn't take ourselves that seriously, and arrogantly demand that we must matter in a
million years.

21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity

1. Every culture in every epoch has had theistic beliefs.

2. When peoples, widely separated by both space and time, hold
similar beliefs, the best explanation is that those beliefs are true.

3. The best explanation for why every culture has had theistic
beliefs is that those beliefs are true.

4. God exists.

FLAW: 2 is false. Widely separated people could very
well come up with the same false beliefs. Human nature is universal, and
thus prone to universal illusions and shortcomings of perception, memory,
reasoning, and objectivity. Also , many of the needs
and terrors and dependencies of the human condition (such as the knowledge of
our own mortality, and the attendant desire not to die) are
universal. Our beliefs don't arise only from well-evaluated
reasoning, but from wishful thinking, self-deception, self-aggrandizement,
gullibility, false memories, visual illusions, and other mental glitches.
Well-grounded beliefs may be the exception rather than the rule when it comes
to psychologically fraught beliefs, which tend to bypass rational grounding and
spring instead from unexamined emotions. The fallacy of arguing that if
an idea is universally held then it must be true was labeled by the ancient logicians consensus gentium.

22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics

1. Mystics go into a special state in which they seem to see
aspects of reality that elude everyday experience.

2. We cannot evaluate the truth of their experiences from the
viewpoint of everyday experience (from 1)

3. There is a unanimity among mystics as
to what they experience.

4. When there is unanimity among observers as to what they
experience, then unless they are all deluded in the same way, the best
explanation for their unanimity is that their experiences are true.

5. There is no reason to think that mystics are all deluded in
the same way.

6. The best explanation for the unanimity of mystical experience
is that what mystics perceive is true (from 4 & 5).

FLAW 1: Premise 5 is disputable. There is indeed reason to think mystics might
be deluded in similar ways. The universal human nature that refuted the
Argument from the Consensus of Humanity entails that the human brain can be
stimulated in unusual ways that give rise to universal (but not objectively
correct) experiences. The fact that we can stimulate the temporal lobes of
non-mystics and induce mystical experiences in them is evidence that mystics
might indeed all be deluded in similar ways. Certain drugs can also induce
feelings of transcendence, such as an enlargement of perception beyond the
bounds of effability, a melting of the boundaries of the self, a joyful
expansion out into an existence that seems to be all One, with all that Oneness
pronouncing Yes upon us. Such experiences, which, as William James points out,
are most easily attained by getting drunk, are of the same kind as the
mystical: "The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic
consciousness." Of course, we do not exalt the stupor and delusions of
drunkenness because we know what caused them. The fact that the same
effects can overcome a person when we know what caused them (and hence don't
call the experience "mystical") — is reason to suspect that the
causes of mystical experiences also lie within internal excitations of the
brain having nothing to do with perception.

FLAW 2: The struggle to put the ineffable contents of abnormal experiences into
language inclines the struggler toward pre-existing religious language, which
is the only language that most of us have been exposed to which overlaps with
the unusual sensations of an altered state of consciousness. This observation
casts doubt on Premise 7.See also The Argument from Sublimity, #34 below.

23. The Argument from Holy Books

1. There are holy books that reveal the word of God.
2. The word of God is necessarily true.
3. The word of God reveals the existence of God.
4. God exists.

FLAW 1: This is a circular argument if ever there was one. The first three
premises cannot be maintained unless one independently knows the very
conclusion to be proved, namely that God exists.

FLAW 2: A glance at the world's religions shows that there are numerous books
and scrolls and doctrines and revelations that all claim to reveal the word of
God. But they are mutually incompatible. Should I believe that Jesus is my
personal savior? Or should I believe that God made a covenant with the Jews
requiring every Jew to keep the commandments of the Torah? Should I believe
that Mohammad was Allah's last prophet and that Ali, the prophet's cousin and
husband of his daughter Fatima, ought to have been the first caliph, or that
Mohammad was Allah's last prophet and that Ali was the fourth and last caliph?
Should I believe that the resurrected prophet Moroni dictated the Book of
Mormon to Joseph Smith? Or that Ahura Mazda, the benevolent Creator, is at
cosmic war with the malevolent Angra Mainyu? And on and on it goes. Only the
most arrogant provincialism could allow someone to believe that the holy
documents that happen to be held sacred by the clan
he was born into are true, while all the documents held sacred by the clans he
wasn't born into are false.

24. The Argument from Perfect Justice

1. This world provides numerous instances of imperfect justice —
bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people.
2. It violates our sense of justice that imperfect justice may
prevail.

3. There must be a transcendent realm in which perfect justice
prevails (from 1 and 2).
4. A transcendent realm in which perfect justice prevails entails
the Perfect Judge.
5. The Perfect Judge is God.
6. God exists.

FLAW: This is a good example of the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Our wishes for
how the world should be need not be true; just because we want there to be some
realm in which perfect justice applies does not mean that there is such a
realm. In other words, there is no way to pass from Premise 2 to Premise 3
without the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking.

25. The Argument from Suffering

1. There is much suffering in this world.
3. Some suffering (or at least its possibility) is a demanded by
human moral agency: if people could not choose evil acts that cause suffering,
moral choice would not exist.4.Whatever suffering cannot be explained
as the result of human moral agency must also have some purpose (from 2 &
3).
5. There are virtues — forbearance, courage, compassion, and so
on — that can only develop in the presence of suffering. We may call them
"the virtues of suffering."
6. Some suffering has the purpose of our developing the virtues
of suffering (from 5).
7. Even taking 3 and 6 into account, the amount of suffering in
the world is still enormous — far more than what is required for us to benefit
from suffering.
8. Moreover, there are those who suffer who can never develop the
virtues of suffering--children, animals, those who perish in their agony.
9. There is more suffering than we can explain by reference to
the purposes that we can discern (from 7 & 8).
10 There are purposes for suffering that we cannot discern (from
2 and 9).
11. Only a being who has a sense of
purpose beyond ours could provide the purpose of all suffering (from 10).
12. Only God could have a sense of purpose beyond ours.
13. God exists.

FLAW: This argument is a sorrowful one, since it
highlights the most intolerable feature of our world, the excess of suffering.
The suffering in this world is excessive in both its intensity and its
prevalence, often undergone by those who can never gain anything from it. This
is a powerful argument against the existence of a compassionate and powerful
deity. It is only the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking, embodied in
Premise 2, that could make us presume that what is
psychologically intolerable cannot be the case.

26. The Argument from the Survival of The Jews

1. The Jews introduced the world to the idea of the one God, with
his universal moral code
2. The survival of the Jews, living for milliennia without a
country of their own, and facing a multitude of enemies that sought to destroy
not only their religion but all remnants of the race, is a historical
unlikelihood.
3. The Jews have survived against vast odds (from 2).
4. There is no natural explanation for so unlikely an event as
the survival of the Jews (from 3).
5. The best explanation is that they have some transcendent
purpose to play in human destiny (from 1 and 4).
6. Only God could have assigned a transcendent destiny to the
Jews.
7. God exists.

FLAW 1: The fact that the Jews, after the destruction of the Second Temple by
the Romans, had no country of their own made it more likely, rather than less
likely, that they would survive as a people. If they had been concentrated in one
country, they would surely have been conquered by one of history's great
empires, as happened to other vanished tribes. But a people
dispersed across a vast diaspora is more resilient, which is why other
stateless peoples, like the Parsis and Roma, have also survived for millennia,
often against harrowing odds. Moreover, the Jews encouraged cultural traits —
such as literacy, urban living, specialization in middleman occupations, and an
extensive legal code to govern their internal affairs --that gave them further
resilience against the vicissitudes of historical change. The survival of the
Jews, therefore, is not a miraculous improbability.

COMMENT: The persecution of the Jews need not be seen as a part of a cosmic
moral drama. The unique role that Judaism played in disseminating monotheism,
mostly through the organs of its two far more popular monotheistic offshoots,
Christianity and Islam, has bequeathed to its adherents an unusual amount of
attention, mostly negative, from adherents of those other monotheistic
religions.

27. The Argument from The Upward Curve of History

1. There is an upward moral curve to human history (tyrannies
fall; the evil side loses in major wars; democracy, freedom, and civil rights
spread).
2. Natural selection's favoring of those who are fittest to
compete for resources and mates has bequeathed humankind selfish and aggressive
traits.
3. Left to their own devices, a selfish and aggressive species
could not have ascended up a moral curve over the course of history (from 2).4.Only God has the power and the concern
for us to curve history upward.
5. God exists.

FLAW: Though our species has inherited traits of selfishness and aggression, we
have also inherited capacities for empathy, reasoning, and learning from
experience. We have also inherited language, and with it a means to pass on the
lessons we have learned from history. And so humankind has
slowly reasoned its way toward a broader and more sophisticated understanding
of morality, and more effective institutions for keeping peace. We make
moral progress as we do scientific progress, through reasoning,
experimentation, and the rejection of failed alternatives.

28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius

1. Genius is the highest level of creative capacity, the level
which, by definition, defies explanation.
2. Genius does not happen by way of natural psychological
processes (from 1).
3. The cause of genius must lie outside of natural psychological
processes (from 2).
4. The insights of genius have helped in the cumulative progress
of humankind — scientific, technological, philosophical, moral, artistic,
societal, political, spiritual.
5. The cause of genius must both lie outside of natural
psychological processes and be such as to care about the progress of humankind
(from 3 and 4).
6. Only God could work outside of natural psychological processes
and create geniuses to light the path of humankind.
7. God exists.

FLAW 1: The psychological traits that go into human accomplishment, such as
intelligence and perseverance, are heritable. By the laws of probability, rare
individuals will inherit a concentrated dose of those genes. Given a nurturing
cultural context, these individuals will, some of the time, exercise their
powers to accomplish great feats. Those are the individuals we call geniuses.
We may not know enough about genetics, neuroscience, and cognition to explain
exactly what makes for a Mozart or an Einstein, but exploiting this gap to
argue for supernatural provenance is an example of The Fallacy of Arguing
from Ignorance.

1. We are finite, and everything with which we come into physical
contact is finite.
2. We have a knowledge of the infinite, demonstrably so in
mathematics.
3. We could not have derived this knowledge of the infinite from
the finite, from anything which we are and come in contact with (from 1).
4. Only something itself infinite could have implanted knowledge
of the infinite in us ( from 2 and 3).
5. God would want us to have a knowledge of the infinite, both
for the cognitive pleasure it affords us and because it allows us to come to
know him, who is himself infinite.
6. God is the only entity both that is infinite and that could
have an intention of implanting the knowledge of the infinite within us (from 4
& 5).
7. God exists.

FLAW: There are certain computational procedures governed by what logicians
call recursive rules. A recursive rule is one that refers to itself, and hence
it can be applied to its own output ad infinitum. For example, we can define a
natural number recursively: 1 is a natural number and if you add 1 to a natural
number, the result is a natural number. We can apply this rule an indefinite number
of times and thereby generate an infinite series of natural numbers. Recursive
rules allow a finite system (a set of rules, a computer, a
brain) to reason about an infinity of objects, refuting Premise 3.

COMMENT: In 1931 the young logician Kurt Gödel published a paper proving a
result called the Incompleteness Theorem (actually there are two). Basically,
what Gödel demonstrated is that recursive rules cannot capture all of
arithmetic. So though the flaw discussed above is sufficient to invalidate Premise
3 , it should not be understood as suggesting that all
of our mathematical knowledge is reducible to recursive rules.

30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality

1. Mathematical truths are necessarily true. (There is no
possible world in which, say, 2 plus 2 does not equal 4, or in which the square
root of 2 can be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers.)
2. The truths that describe our physical world, no matter how
fundamental, are empirical, requiring observational evidence. (So, for example,
we await some empirical means to test string theory, in order to find out
whether we live in a world of eleven dimensions.)
3. Truths that require empirical evidence are not necessary
truths. (We require empirical evidence because there are possible worlds in
which these are not truths, and so we have to test that ours is not such a
world.)
4. The truths of our physical world are not necessary truths
(from 2 and 3).
5. The truths of our physical world cannot explain mathematical
truths (from 1 and 4).
6. Mathematical truths exist on a different plane of existence
from physical truths (from 5).
7. Only something which itself exists on a different plane of
existence from the physical can explain mathematical truths (from 6).

8. Only God can explain mathematical
truths (from 7).
9. God exists.

Mathematics is derived through pure reason — what the philosophers call a
priori reason — which means that it cannot be refuted by any empirical
observations. The fundamental question in philosophy of mathematics is: how can
mathematics be true but not empirical? Is it because mathematics describes some
trans-empirical reality — as mathematical realists believe — or is it because
mathematics has no content at all and is a purely formal game consisting of
stipulated rules and their consequences? The Argument from Mathematical Reality
assumes, in its third premise, the position of mathematical realism, which
isn't a fallacy in itself; many mathematicians believe it, some of them arguing
that it follows from Gödel's incompleteness theorems (see the COMMENT in The
Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity, #30 above). This argument, however,
goes further and tries to deduce God's existence from the trans-empirical
existence of mathematical reality.

FLAW 1: The inference of 5, from 1 and 4, does not take into account the
formalist response to the non-empirical nature of mathematics.

FLAW 2: Even if one, Platonistically, accepts the
derivation of 5 and then 6, there is something fishy about proceeding onward to
7, with its presumption that something outside of mathematical reality must
explain the existence of mathematical reality. Lurking within 7 is the hidden
premise: mathematical truths must be explained by reference to non-mathematical
truths. But why?If God can be
self-explanatory, as this argument presumes, why then can't mathematical
reality be self-explanatory — especially since the truths of mathematics are,
as this argument asserts, necessarily true?

FLAW 3: Mathematical reality — if indeed it exists — is, admittedly,
mysterious. But invoking God does not dispel this puzzlement; it is an instance
of "The Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another."
The mystery of God's existence is often used, by those who assert it, as an explanatory
sink hole.

31.The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal's
Wager)

1. Either God exists or God doesn't exist.
2. A person can either believe that God exists or believe that
God doesn't exist(from 1).
3. If God exists and you believe, you receive eternal salvation.
4. If God exists and you don't believe, you receive eternal
damnation.
5. If God doesn't exist and you believe, you've been duped, have
wasted time in religious observance, and have missed out on decadent enjoyments.
6. If God doesn't exist, and you don't believe, then you have
avoided a false belief.
7. You have much more to gain by believing in God than not
believing in him, and much more to lose by not believing in God than believing
in him (from, 3, 4, 5, & 6)
8. It is more rational to believe that God exists than to believe
that he doesn't exist (from 7).

God exists

God doesn't exist

Believe

Eternal salvation

You've been duped, missed out on some sins

Don't Believe

Eternal damnation

You got it right

This unusual argument does not justify the conclusion that "God
exists." Rather it argues that it is rational to believe that God exists,
given that we don't know whether he exists.

FLAW 1: The "believe" option in Pascal's wager can be
interpreted in two ways.

One is that the wagerer genuinely has to believe, deep down, that God exists;
in other words, it is not enough to mouth a creed, or merely act as if God
exists. According to this interpretation, God, if He exists, can peer into a
person's soul and discern the person's actual convictions. If so, the kind of
"belief" that Pascal's wager advises — a purely pragmatic strategy,
chosen because the expected benefits exceed the expected costs — would not be enough.
Indeed, it's not even clear that this option is coherent: if one chooses to
believe something because of the consequences of holding that belief, rather
than being intuitively convinced of it, is it really a belief, or just an empty
vow?

The other interpretation is that it is enough to act in the way that
traditional believers act: say prayers, go to services, recite the appropriate
creed, and go through the other motions of religion.

The problem is that Pascal's wager offers no guidance as to which prayers,
which services, which creed, to live by. Say I chose to believe in the
Zoroastrian cosmic war between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu to avoid the wrath
of the former, while the real fact of the matter is that God gave the Torah to
the Jews, and I am thereby inviting the wrath of Yahweh (or vice-versa). Given
all the things I could "believe" in, I am in constant danger of
incurring the negative consequences of disbelief even though I choose the
"belief" option. The fact that Blaise Pascal stated
his wager as two stark choices, putting the outcomes in blatantly Christian
terms — eternal salvation and eternal damnation — reveals more about his own
upbringing than they do about the logic of belief. The wager simply
codifies his particular "live options," to use William James's term,
for the only choices that seem possible to a given believer.

FLAW 2: Pascal's wager assumes a petty, egotistical, and vindictive God who
punishes anyone who does not believe in him. But the great monotheistic
religions all declare that "mercy" is one of God's essential traits.
A merciful God would surely have some understanding of why a person may not
believe in him (if the evidence for God were obvious, the fancy reasoning of
Pascal's wager would not be necessary), and so would extend compassion to a
nonbeliever. (Bertrand Russell, when asked what he would have to say to God if,
despite his philosophical atheism, he were to die and face his Creator,
responded, "Oh, Lord, why did you not provide more evidence?') The nonbeliever
therefore should have nothing to worry about — falsifying the negative payoff
in the lower-left-hand cell of the matrix.

FLAW 3: The calculations of expected value in Pascal's wager omit a crucial
part of the mathematics: the probabilities of each of the two columns, which
have to be multiplied with the payoff in each cell to determine the expected
value of each cell. If the probability of God's existence (ascertained by other
means) is infinitesimal, then even if the cost of not believing in him is high,
the overall expectation may not make it worthwhile to choose the
"believe" row (after all, we take many other risks in life with
severe possible costs but low probabilities, such as boarding an airplane). One
can see how this invalidates Pascal's Wager by considering similar wagers. Say
I told you that a fire-breathing dragon has moved into the next apartment and
that unless you set out a bowl of marshmallows for him every night he will
force his way into your apartment and roast you to a crisp. According to
Pascal's wager, you should leave out the marshmallows. Of course
you don't, even though you are taking a terrible risk in choosing not to
believe in the dragon, because you don't assign a high enough probability to
the dragon's existence to justify even the small inconvenience.

32. The Argument from Pragmatism

(William James's Leap of Faith)

1. The consequences for the believer's life of believing should
be considered as part of the evidence for the truth of the belief (just as the
effectiveness of a scientific theory in its practical applications is
considered evidence for the truth of the theory). Call this the pragmatic
evidence for the belief.

2. Certain beliefs effect a change for the better in the
believer's life — the necessary condition being that they are believed.

3. The belief in God is a belief that effects a change for the
better in a person's life.

4. If one tries to decide whether or not to believe in God based
on the evidence available, one will never get the chance to evaluate the
pragmatic evidence for the beneficial consequences of believing in God (from 2
and 3).

5. One ought to make 'the leap of faith' (the term is James's)
and believe in God, and only then evaluate the evidence (from 1 and 4).

This argument can be read out of William James's classic essay "The Will
to Believe." The first premise , as presented
here, is a little less radical than James's pragmatic definition of truth in
general, according to which a proposition is true if believing that it is true
has a cumulative beneficial effect on the believer's life. The pragmatic
definition of truth has severe problems, including possible incoherence: in
evaluating the effects of the belief on the believer, we have to know the truth
about what those effects are, which forces us to fall back on the old-fashioned
notion of truth. To make the best case for The Argument from Pragmatism,
therefore, the first premise is here understood as claiming only that the
pragmatic consequences of belief are a relevant source of evidence in
ascertaining the truth, not that they can actually be equated with the truth.

FLAW 1: What exactly does effecting "a change for
the better on the believer's life" mean? For an antebellum Southerner,
there was more to be gained in believing that slavery is morally permissible
than in believing it heinous. It often doesn't pay to be an iconoclast or
revolutionary thinker, no matter how much truer your ideas are than the ideas
opposing you. It didn't improve Galileo's life to believe that the earth moved
around the sun rather than that the sun and the heavens revolve around the
earth. (Of course, you could say that it's always intrinsically better to
believe something true rather than something false, but then you're just using
the language of the pragmatist to mask a non-pragmatic notion of truth.)

FLAW 2: The Argument from Pragmatism implies an extreme relativism regarding
the truth, because the effects of belief differ for different believers. A
profligate, impulsive drunkard may have to believe in a primitive retributive
God who will send him to Hell if he doesn't stay out of barroom fights, whereas
a contemplative mensch may be better off with an abstract deistic presence who completes his deepest existential world view. But either
there is a vengeful God who sends sinners to Hell or there isn't. If one allows
pragmatic consequences to determine truth, then truth becomes relative to the
believer, which is incoherent.

FLAW 3: Why should we only consider the pragmatic effects on the believer's
life? What about the effects on everyone else? The history of religious
intolerance, including inquisitions, fatwas, and suicide bombers, suggests that the effects on one person's life of
another person's believing in God can be pretty grim.

FLAW 4: The pragmatic argument for God suffers from the first flaw of The
Argument from Decision Theory (#31 above) — namely the assumption that the
belief in God is like a faucet that one can turn on and off as the need arises.
If I make the leap of faith in order to evaluate the pragmatic consequences of
belief, then if those consequences are not so good, can I leap back again to
disbelief? Isn't a leap of faith a one-way maneuver? "The will to
believe" is an oxymoron: beliefs are forced on a person (ideally, by logic
and evidence); they are not chosen for their consequences.

33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason

1. Our belief in reason cannot be justified by reason, since that
would be circular.
2. Our belief in reason must be accepted on faith (from 1).
3. Every time we exercise reason we are exercising faith (from
2).
4. Faith provides good rational grounds for beliefs (since it is,
in the final analysis, necessary even for the belief in reason — from 3).
5. We are justified in using faith for any belief that is so
important to our lives that not believing it would render us incoherent (from
4).
6. We cannot avoid faith in God if we are to live coherent moral
and purposeful lives.
7. We are justified in believing that God exists (from 5 &
6).
8. God exists.

Reason is a faculty of thinking, the very faculty of giving grounds for our
beliefs. To justify reason would be to try to give grounds for the belief:
"We ought to accept the conclusions of sound arguments." Let's say we
produce a sound argument for the conclusion that "we ought to accept the
conclusions of sound arguments." How could we legitimately accept the
conclusion of that sound argument without independently knowing the conclusion?
Any attempt to justify the very propositions that we must use in order to
justify propositions is going to land us in circularity.

FLAW 1: This argument tries to generalize the inability of reason to justify
itself to an abdication of reason when it comes to justifying God's existence.
But the inability of reason to justify reason is a unique case in epistemology,
not an illustration of a flaw of reason that can be generalized to some other
kind of belief — and certainly not a belief in the existence of some entity
with specific properties such as creating the world or defining morality.

Indeed, one could argue that the attempt to justify reason with reason is not
circular, but rather, unnecessary. One already is, and always will be,
committed to reason by the very process one is already engaged in, namely
reasoning. Reason is non-negotiable; all sides concede it. It needs no
justification, because it is justification. A belief in God is not like that at
all.

FLAW 2: If one really took the unreasonability of reason as a license to
believe things on faith, then which things should one believe in? If it is a
license to believe in a single God who gave his son for our sins, why isn't it
just as much a license to believe in Zeus and all the other Greek gods, or the
three major gods of Hinduism, or the angel Moroni ?
For that matter, why not Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy? If one says that
there are good reasons to accept some entities on faith, while rejecting
others, then one is saying that it is ultimately reason, not faith,
that must be invoked to justify a belief.

FLAW 3: Premise 6, which claims that a belief in God is necessary in order to
have a purpose in one's life, or to be moral, has already been challenged in
the discussions of The Argument from Moral Truth (#16 above) and The Argument
from Personal Purpose (#19 above).

34. The Argument from Sublimity

1. There are experiences that are windows into the wholeness of
existence — its grandeur, beauty, symmetry, harmony, unity, even
its goodness.
2. We glimpse a benign transcendence in these moments.
3. Only God could provide us with a glimpse of benign
transcendence.
4. God exists.

FLAW: An experience of sublimity is an aesthetic experience Aesthetic
experience can indeed be intense and blissful, absorbing our attention so
completely while exciting our pleasure that they seem to lift us right out of
ourselves. Aesthetic experiences vary in their strength, and when they are
overwhelming, we grope for terms like "transcendence" to describe the
overwhelmingness. Yet for all that, aesthetic experiences are still, more than
likely, internal excitations of the brain, as we see from the fact that
ingesting recreational drugs can bring on even more intense experiences of
transcendence. And the particular triggers for natural aesthetic experiences
are readily explicable from the evolutionary pressures that have shaped the
perceptual systems of human beings. An eye for sweeping vistas, dramatic skies,
bodies of water, large animals, flowering and fruiting plants, and strong
geometric patterns with repetition and symmetry, was necessary to
orient attention to aspects of the environment that were matters of life and
death to the species as it evolved in its natural environment. The
identification of a blissfully aesthetic experience with a glimpse into benign
transcendence is an example of The Projection Fallacy, dramatic demonstrations
of our spreading ourselves onto the world. This is most obvious when the
experience gets fleshed out into the religious terms that come most naturally
to the particular believer, such as a frozen waterfall being seen by a
Christian as a manifestation of the Christian trinity. One does not detract
anything from the sublimity of aesthetic experiences by seeing them for what
they are, namely sublime aesthetic experiences. Music, too, produces such
experiences, though there we know exactly who the creators were.

35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the World

(Spinoza's God)

1. All facts must have explanations.
2. The fact that there is a universe at all — and that it is this
universe, with just these laws of nature — has an explanation (from 1).3.There must, in principle, be a Theory
of Everything that explains why just this universe, with these laws of nature,
exists (from 2. Note that this premise should not be interpreted as entailing
that we have the capacity to come up with a Theory of Everything; it may elude
the cognitive abilities we have.)

4. If The Theory of Everything explains
everything, it explains why it is the Theory of Everything.
5. The only way that the Theory of Everything could explain why
it is the Theory of Everything is if it is itself necessarily true (i.e. true
in all possible worlds).
6. The Theory of Everything is necessarily true (from 4 & 5).
7. The universe, understood in terms of the Theory of Everything,
exists necessarily and explains itself (from 6).
8. That which exists necessarily and explains itself is God (a
definition of "God").
9. The universe is God (from 7 & 8).
10. God exists.

Whenever Einstein was asked whether he believed in God, he responded that he
believed in "Spinoza's God." This argument presents Spinoza's God. It
is one of the most elegant and subtle arguments for God's existence,
demonstrating where one ends up if one rigorously eschews the Fallacy of
Invoking One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another: one
ends up with the universe, and nothing but the universe: a universe which
itself provides all the answers to all the questions one can pose about it. A
major problem with the argument, however, in addition to the flaws discussed
below, is that it is not at all clear that it is God whose existence is being
proved. Spinoza's conclusion is that the universe that is described by the laws
of nature simply is God. Perhaps the conclusion should, rather, be that the
universe is different from what it appears to be — no matter how arbitrary and
chaotic it may appear, it is in fact perfectly lawful and necessary, and
therefore
worthy of our awe. But is its awe-inspiring lawfulness reason
enough to regard it as God? Spinoza's God is sharply at variance with all other
divine conceptions.

The argument has only one substantive premise, its first one, which, though
unproved, is not unreasonable; it is, in fact, the claim that the universe
itself is thoroughly reasonable. Though this first premise can't be
proved, it is the guiding faith of many physicists (including Einstein).
It is the claim that everything must have an explanation; even the laws of nature,
in terms of which processes are explained, must have an explanation. In other
words, there has to be an explanation for why it is these laws of nature rather
than some other, which is another way of asking for why it is this world rather
than some other.

FLAW: The first premise can be challenged. Our world could conceivably be one
in which randomness and contingency have free reign, no matter what the
intuitions of some scientists are. Maybe some things just are
("stuff happens"), including the fundamental laws of nature.
Philosophers sometimes call this just- is-ness "contingency" and, if
the fundamental laws of nature are contingent, then even if everything that
happens in the world is explainable by those laws, the laws themselves couldn't
be explained. There is a sense in which this argument recalls
The Argument from the Improbable Self. Both demand explanations for just
this-ness, whether of just this universe or just this me.

The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe fleshes out the
consequences of the powerful first premise, but some might regard the argument
as a reductio ad absurdum of that premise.

COMMENT: Spinoza's argument, if sound, invalidates all the other arguments, the
ones that try to establish the existence of a more traditional God—that is, a
God who stands distinct from the world described by the laws of nature, as well
as distinct from the world of human meaning, purpose, and morality. Spinoza's
argument claims that any transcendent God, standing outside of that for which
he is invoked as explanation, is invalidated by the first powerful premise,
that all things are part of the same explanatory fabric. The mere coherence of
The Argument from The Intelligibility of The Universe, therefore, is sufficient
to reveal the invalidity of the other theistic arguments. This is why Spinoza,
although he offered a proof of what he called "God," is often
regarded as the most effective of all atheists.

36. The Argument from The Abundance of Arguments

1. The more arguments there are for a proposition, the more
confidence we should have in it, even if every argument is imperfect. (Science
itself proceeds by accumulating evidence, each piece by itself being
inconclusive.)

2. There is not just one argument for the existence of God, but many
— thirty-five (with variations) in this list alone.

3. The arguments, though not flawless, are persuasive enough that
they have convinced billions of people, and for millennia have been taken
seriously by history's greatest minds.

4. The probability that each one is true must be significantly
greater than zero (from 3).

5. For God not to exist, every one of the arguments for his
existence must be false, which is extremely unlikely (from 4
). Imagine, for the sake of argument, that each argument has an average
probability of only .2 of being true. Then the probability that all 35 are
flase is (1-0.2)^35 = .0004, an extremely low
probability.

6. It is extremely probable that God exists (from 5).

FLAW 1: Premise 3 is vulnerable to t he same criticisms as the Argument
from the Consensus of Humanity. The flaws that accompany each argument may be
extremely damaging, even fatal, notwithstanding the fact that they have been
taken seriously by many people throughout history. In other words, the average
probability of any of the arguments being true may be far less than .2, in
which case the probability that all of them are false could be high.

FLAW 2: This argument treats all the other arguments as being on an
equal footing, distributing equal probabilities to them all, and rewarding all
of them, too, with the commendation of being taken seriously by history's
greatest minds. Many of the arguments on this list have been completely
demolished by such minds as David Hume and Baruch Spinoza: their probability is
zero.

P1. God is
the necessary precondition to intelligibility, by the impossibility of the
contrary as has been revealed in Scripture.
P2. Intelligibility exists.
C. Therefore God exists.

The transcendental argument states that one cannot make
sense of ANY argument, or object to any argument without FIRST presupposing
that God exists. You see Keith, in order to argue against that proof, one would
need to justify intelligibility apart from God, which is impossible.

Knowledge is possible (or some
other statement pertaining to logic or morality)

If there is no god, knowledge
is not possible

Therefore God exists.

FLAW 1: The TAG
does not fulfill the necessary prerequisites for an Argument of
Proof - that is, to have already proved the foundational premises before
the conclusion is made. Any premise that has not been proved, by its very
nature, is an assumption and is considered to be begging the question. An assumption, by
definition, might be wrong.

FLAW 2: The TAG
moves from conceptual necessity to necessary existence. This criticism argues
that proving the conceptual necessity of a worldview doesn't establish its
ontological reality. In other words: one may need to think about the
world in a certain way in order to make sense of one's experience and
knowledge, but that doesn't prove that the world actually is that way.

FLAW 3: The TAG
does not provide a uniqueness proof: even if the TAG can prove the existence of
a god, it doesn't prove that of the Christian god. Any sufficiently similar
god, such as the Islamic God, Allah, would do.